(National)11/2012 - OF DIVERSIONS, FA...

Author Message   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 11745 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 5 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, November 19, 2012 - 10:20 am:        My e-mail seems to have two recurring themes lately, each from the opposite side of the political spectrum. It goes like this: "Hey, have you seen this? Anonymous claims to have hacked Karl Rove's intended election manipulation." And this: "Are you doing anything about the rampant voter fraud that put Obama in office?" 1. The alleged "hack" by Anonymous may or may not have been real, but if it was, a careful reading indicates that it was not a hack of voting machines, but more akin to the odious phone-jamming scheme used by a Republican operative in New Hampshire some years back. Whether you wear a blue or red political shirt, this kind of attack is nothing to brag about. It involves interfering with get out the vote efforts, and regardless of which side is working on get out the vote, obstructing such efforts is uncool. There is no credible proof that this Anonymous hack even happened. If it did, it violated the principle of encouraging political participation. We have to be careful about stories such as this, because they can divert important work on election transparency into chasing phantoms. 2. The "rampant voter fraud" claim diverts attention from where wholesale tampering actually takes place. If you plan to rig an election, you do it as an inside job, not with alleged busloads of people casting multiple votes, and not with herds of voter impersonators fooling election judges. You do it with absentees, you do it by manipulating who can vote, you do it by altering the voting machine counts, you do it by thwarting chain of custody. In other words, it's not the outsiders -- the voters -- where the focus needs to be. Let's keep our eye on the ball. Who handled the ballots? Who watched? Who programmed the machines? Was the list loaded into electronic pollbooks the real one? Was the count interrupted for some reason? Did any ballots disappear? Were people prevented from voting? How do we know that the ballots said to have been mailed in are the same ones that were counted, and how do we know they were put into the pool by real voters rather than an elections worker? We need to step away from our favorite political candidates to deal with the underlying structural problem. Until we fix transparency problems, actual tampering -- considerably more damaging than anything Anonymous claimed to have done -- will happen over and over. The real problem that we have to wrap our heads around, educate others about, and solve, is public right to see and authenticate the count. Germany ruled that the public must be able to see and authenticate every essential step of the election, without need for special expertise, and that no after the fact procedure can be substituted for the right to authenticate the original count. That is exactly the model we here in the USA need to work towards, but first, we have to help the public understand that public controls over our own elections are the very essence of self-government, and self-government is the basis for all democratic systems. There are four things the public must be able to see and authenticate: 1) Who can vote (voter list) 2) Who did vote (poll list) 3) Counting of the vote 4) Chain of custody These are the fundamental issues, and we will restore these to the American public, once we properly identify them and demand these things, with no compromise and no wasting time on side issues, half-measures, or capitulation. You may ask what you can do to help. I love that question. It's so much better than the passive "what is being done?" Each major civil rights movement has several stages. We are now moving from the focus group stage, where we have been learning to craft the most accurate description of the problem to be solved, in the most persuasive terms, and into the distribution stage, where we are passing the message -- quite literally -- from person to person to build momentum to help tip the scales in legal and legislative efforts. So that's what you can do: Learn to discuss election transparency in terms of basic right to self-govern, which is the principle that is the foundation for all democratic systems. To have self-governance, you have to have real, tangible, meaningful transparency. Specifically, "The public must be able to see and authenticate each essential step of the election, without need for special expertise, and no after-the-fact procedure can be substituted for the right to authenticate the original. The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.   J. Peterson Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Isonno Post Number: 1 Registered: 11-2012 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, November 19, 2012 - 12:05 pm:        This is in response to Bev's post: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/82339.html As I understand it, there are TWO aspects to the "hacks" Anonymous is claiming to have made: - Shutting down the "Project ORCA" GOTV system the Republicans put in place As you describe, this is essentially sabotage, and is prosecutable crime. - Blocking a Rove/GOP attempt to tamper with the Ohio vote reporting. If you believe the Anonymous letter, they claim to have discovered systems in place to hijack the Ohio (and perhaps other states') vote reporting systems. They claimed to have blocked the hijacking and let the actual state vote report go forward. If the second claim is true, then this second aspect of Anonymous' activity is commendable. As I'm sure you're aware, there is significant evidence the vote reporting in 2004 was hijacked allowing Bush to win the election.   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 11746 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, November 19, 2012 - 12:17 pm:        Yes. I'm aware of 2004. Writing that you blocked the hijacking of the vote is just writing a novel unless you provide evidence. Man in the Middle approaches would have been quickly exposed by comparing poll tape to report. Had Romney won, there is no question that citizens would have fanned out over Ohio demanding to inspect the poll tapes. Ohio does have some weaknesses, however, and they were put in by Democratic Sec. State Brunner, who rather inexplicably decided not to run poll tapes at polling places with poll worker sign-off, but to transport ballots instead to a central counting machine. Corroboration of central counts using the poll tape method are often impossible, if they either mix polling places among batches or fail to run batch tapes. And, also under Brunner, Ohio vastly expanded its absentee voting program. So you see why the real issue is transparency. You've got a Democratic Sec. State implementing procedures that effectively block one of the checks and balances for man in the middle attacks. But I think that unless they chose only the central count ballots to hijack results, it would have been spotted almost instantly. Ohio has excellent public inspection and public records laws. And Ohio has a ton of voting rights activists who are already up to speed on this stuff. Actually, rather than imputing Rove's Election Night perplexity to an Anonymous hack, I think it's even more plausible that the networks prematurely called the election. There were half a million votes uncounted when they made that call, many of those in suburban Hamilton County. It did look like jumping the gun, and when they pull out that "It's a science" B.S. instead of just counting the votes, I think there is ample reason to question the call. The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.   Mary Ellen Azzi Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Mmazzi Post Number: 1 Registered: 11-2012 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - 1:58 am:        I don't quite get your answer here, Bev. First, you say that "Man in the Middle approaches would have been quickly exposed by comparing poll tape to report. Had Romney won, there is no question that citizens would have fanned out over Ohio demanding to inspect the poll tapes." Well, then why didn't Kerry get inaugurated? If the answer is that things changed in Ohio, it still seems like a contradictory statement... you talk about inspecting poll tapes but then go on to say that Brunner changed the system so they don't run poll tapes at the polling places. As far as calling too early... it was no different than any of the other states called. Regarding evidence of the Anonymous block. To whom should they give it? Who should they trust? And how easy is it to do that and still remain anonymous?   Joseph Kiniry Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Kiniry Post Number: 12 Registered: 3-2011 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - 2:37 am:        Mary, With regards to your final queries, hackers would provide evidence to someone like me and could/would do so in a completely anonymous fashion. A few members of the technical evoting research community like myself have interacted with white, grey, and blackhat hackers in the past on these issues. Joe Kiniry --- Prof. Joseph Kiniry DemTech: Trustworthy Democratic Technology - http://www.demtech.dk/   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 11747 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - 5:55 am:        There are so many things that don't hang together in the letter. In one communication, they claim that Rove was blocked 105 times by their firewall. Why, then, did he go on TV not knowing he was blocked? The timing doesn't make sense either. The 2004 issue was a middleman between the central tabulators and the servers. That doesn't even begin -- in other words, the 105 attempts would not even start -- until there is actually data to manipulate. The attempts that were blocked were during Election Day, when there was no central tabulator data yet. In 2004, most Ohio locations used old punch card technology which did not have poll tapes. The poll tapes this year in Ohio exist in some locations and apparently not in others, and to use a middleman approach, they'd need to know in advance which locations were going to have them and which were not going to have them. Also, some central count locations print batch tapes and some do not, and they'd need to know that. Simply blocking a firewall would not allow any selectivity to eliminate the poll tape locations. Also, some locations have poll tapes for certain types of votes (ie polling place votes) but not for others. Using a firewall in the manner described, even if it blocked access between central tabulator and results reporting, would have been caught very quickly. In fact, even local news reporters and candidates would have seen it, because they pull results at the local county office BEFORE it goes to the state server. The public seems to want a bogeyman. They like an exciting story. The letter supposedly by Anonymous fulfills that need, but falls far short of providing even a credible outline for blocking results. There are many ways they could have retained their anonymity while still providing a credible story. So far, they haven't. This isn't Karl Rove aka the Dark Lord Sauron -- depose him and everyone can return to the Shire. This is a structural problem of an opaque and unaccountable system, and if Karl Rove were to croak tomorrow afternoon, we'd still have an opaque and unaccountable system. So let's keep our eye on the ball. The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.   Mike LaBonte Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Mike_labonte Post Number: 649 Registered: 12-2005 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 21 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - 6:54 am:        Whoever did this purported hack is not doing anyone any favor by using nebulous language faking an older era to describe it. This just leaves people making unfounded assumptions about what actually might have happened. Until they start getting specific I see no need to spend another minute thinking about it. From Admin: And with this excellent post by Mike LaBonte, I am locking this thread. I'm about to post a new lead story anyway. Notice how I tampered with the votes on this post? Can't secure a computerized vote counting system from its own administrator.

The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.